So Ramparts of Ice is doing something I don't think I've really seen before: it's critiquing the kind of pushy good-guy male lead a lot of shoujo and shoujo-adjacent rom-coms have. Guys like this usually come swooping into the hapless heroine's life to fix her emotional problems with relentless kindness- think Kazehaya from Kimi ni Todoke for probably the best-written example of it. But Ramparts of Ice is pointing out that there's a really condescending undercurrent to that trope. It puts the main girl in a bad situation just to make the guy look better for taking pity on her. Like, her emotional distress is just fuel for glazing what a Good Guy her love interest is. And as this show points out, it feels really shitty when someone tries to force that on you! Like, how dare you assume I need help just to make yourself feel like a good person! Especially someone like Koyuki who's built up walls to protect herself, so all Minato's prodding feels genuinely kind of threatening! He thinks he's defrosting the ice queen to save her inner self, but all he's doing is clawing open old wounds she was healing from just fine without him. And because of how damn good this author is at writing realistic teenage psychology, it's extremely uncomfortable to watch. Every time he talks to her makes my skin crawl! It's so well done and I hate it!
